The Hubble Lives On 132
tanman writes "CNN reports that NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has agreed to send astronauts on one final mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. No date was reported for the mission, other than before the shuttle fleet is retired. From the article, 'A rehab mission would keep Hubble working until about 2013. It would add two new camera instruments, upgrade aging batteries and stabilizing equipment, add new guidance sensors and repair a light-separating spectrograph. Without a servicing mission, Hubble will likely deteriorate in 2009 or 2010.'"
Backup for the shuttle (Score:3, Insightful)
Manned spaceflight would never have gotten off the ground if NASA had exhibited such risk averse behavior almost 50 years ago.
Good! (Score:4, Insightful)
is between $60M and $1.5B.. let the debate ensue. Not to be rude, but I'm ignoring the slight potential for human loss.
So many more people die in Iraq or Alaskan Crab Fishing or.. well.. you get the point.
I'm sure there will be other missions and shuttle maintenance and general program costs in 2007 whether we fix the Hubble or not. So, it's logical to factor the cost of this mission kind of inversely, thinking rather, how much will we save if we do not repair the Hubble? Probably not a whole $1.3B estimated one way in the link above, much less.
Regardless of how you intemperate the numbers, I think this is a good idea because:
The Hubble works, and we have experience servicing and fixing it, so it's much more likely that all of this will go smoothly.
We can get this done soon, whereas development of a another new telescope will undoubtedly take many times longer.
The Hubble is very meaningful. It's still returning good science and inspirational pictures.
It's functioning keeps a quite few scientists employed, and that's a good thing.
It's good press. NASA needs to flourish. I think the "new NASA" is just starting to hit it's stride, despite an
otherwise depressed national consciousness. We've had lots of enormously meaningful and successful unmanned missions lately, so yay NASA.
Re:Backup for the shuttle (Score:4, Insightful)
Obviously the astronauts. They'd hate to lose another vehicle because it would probably end the shuttle program. However, the American people do not like 7 dead astronauts and neither does NASA. We would mourn astronauts more than the shuttle.
This is probably a fair statement, but there is no need to take risks like that to accomplish the current goals in space. We don't accept 1950's technology or safety standards in construction, aviation, automobiles, or health care - I see no reason to accept it in space. You certainly could argue that our goals are not lofty enough.
You DO still see that risk-taking spirit, though. Spaceship One was pretty seat-of-the-pants.
Re:Who would have thought that (Score:5, Insightful)
Regarding the ground-based telescopes, while adaptive optics and other fancy things allow them to outperform Hubble in some ways such as resolving power, there are still things they can't do. The ground-based telescopes are unable to observe anything for a significant part of the time because sun is happily shining on the sky and reflecting off the atmosphere. Likewise, no matter where you place the telescope under the atmosphere, weather will occasionally be an issue and atmosphere also tends to absorb some of the wavelenghts, although that's not a big issue on visible light. Additionally, atmospheric glow, no matter whether it's from reflected light pollution or natural [wikipedia.org], makes observations of very dim targets more difficult on the ground.